Tech TitansNo titan is too big to speak at the Third Friday Tech luncheon hosted by Tech Titans. For twenty years, Tech Titans, and previously the Metroplex Technology Business Council, has organized a monthly luncheon featuring speakers as diverse as Texas legend and Nobel laureate semiconductor inventor Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments to emerging talents such as recent speaker Chris MacFarland, CEO of Masergy.
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WheelSceneThe biggest electric vehicle holdout has been Toyota. That appears to be changing. In the latest news, The Wall Street Journal and Chunichi Shimbun of Japan both report that the auto giant is working on a revolutionary new battery technology.READ MORE

TechCrunchProject Kino was inspired by "living jewelry," large bedazzled beetles and other insects worn as decoration in different parts of the world. The MIT Media lab version is much more humane, however, using palm-sized robots that cling onto clothing with magnets. The team has been demoing the work for about a year now and has come up with a wide range of functions for the little wheeled robots.
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The GuardianErik Gatenholm first saw a 3-D bioprinter in early 2015. His father, Paul, a professor in chemistry and biopolymer technology at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, had bought one for his department. It cost somewhere in the region of $200,000. READ MORE

CIONo question about it, ransomware is on the rise, and the majority of enterprises remain vulnerable to inbound phish emails that often are the originators of ransomware attacks. One recent ransomware outbreak, Petya, appears to have originated in the Ukraine. Like WannaCry before it, once it has infected a computer it attempts to spread through local area networks.READ MORE

By Shawn Smajstrla Since its infancy almost a decade ago, bitcoin has been both viewed skeptically and heralded as the future of currency. Its path to the latter still seems murky. And now, as bitcoin developers bicker over how to scale the cryptocurrency, a "civil war" looms that could derail some of the momentum bitcoin had gained in recent years. However, the underlying technology of bitcoin — blockchain — is becoming a buzzword across just about every industry imaginable.READ MORE

The Dallas Morning NewsTalk of driverless cars and of pods that can take passengers from one major city to another in less than 30 minutes may seem futuristic. But such advancements may not be that far off.
Last month, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that lays the groundwork for how autonomous vehicles will be able to operate on Texas roads. The new law allows testing and operation of "high and full automation AVs on public roadways" but it also requires that those driverless vehicles comply with all traffic laws and be insured.READ MORE

ECT NewsThe American Technology Council, which President Donald Trump established this spring by executive order, has four years to rebuild the federal government's information technology structure.
A massive reboot of both hardware and software will be necessary to bring government computers up to modern standards. The effort will force many government agencies to shift years of floppy disk and other outdated storage technologies to current cloud storage systems, and to adopt big data and machine learning solutions.READ MORE

EngadgetDuring the early days of globalization, it was relatively easy for corporations to either hide, or be ignorant of, human rights and environmental atrocities committed along their supply chain. Factories and producers were shifting manufacturing or sourcing of raw materials to an increasingly complex network of suppliers, but there was no incentive to look into how a supplier produced, for example, raw cotton or shoe soles.
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